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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday suggested that the United States and Russia lay to rest the controversy over Moscow’s computer hacking of Democratic Party computers, saying, “We ought to get on with our lives.” Trump has cast doubt on the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russian hackers took information from Democratic Party computers and individuals and posted it online to help Trump win the election. The Obama administration plans to announce on Thursday a series of retaliatory measures against Russia for hacking into U.S. political institutions and individuals and leaking information, two U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

Asked by reporters if the United States should sanction Russia, Trump replied: “I think we ought to get on with our lives. I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what’s going on.” Trump made his remarks at Mar-a-Lago, his seaside Florida resort where he is spending the Christmas and New Year’s holidays while also interviewing candidates for administration jobs. Trump said he was not familiar with remarks earlier on Wednesday by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who said Russia and President Vladimir Putin should expect tough sanctions for the cyber attacks. “We have speed. We have a lot of other things but I’m not sure you have the kind of security that you need. But I have not spoken with the senators and I certainly will be over a period of time,” he said.

Moscow has vowed retaliation if Washington issues further economic sanctions over alleged Russian cyber attacks during the US presidential elections. “To be honest, we are tired of the lie about the ‘Russian hackers’, which is being poured down in the United States from the very top,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Wednesday. She warned that her country would respond to any manner of “hostile steps” the US decides to undertake. “It concerns any actions against the Russian diplomatic missions in the US which will immediately ricochet the American diplomats in Russia,” she added.

Zakharova went on to stress that the US was attempting to intimidate Moscow with extending sanctions, taking diplomatic measures and sabotage against Russian computer systems, in retaliation for alleged Russian hacking interference during the US presidential elections in November. Earlier in the day, US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said that Moscow needed to understand it had gone too far during the election, and that new sanctions would target Russian President Vladimir Putin. “It is now time for Russia to understand – enough is enough,” he said. “You can expect that the Congress will investigate the Russian involvement in our elections and there will be bipartisan sanctions coming that will hit Russia hard, particularly Putin as an individual,” he added.

The myth is widespread that President Reagan won the cold war by breaking the Soviet Union financially with an arms race. As one who was involved in Reagan’s effort to end the cold war, I find myself yet again correcting the record. Reagan never spoke of winning the cold war. He spoke of ending it. Other officials in his government have said the same thing, and Pat Buchanan can verify it. Reagan wanted to end the Cold War, not win it. He spoke of those “godawful” nuclear weapons. He thought the Soviet economy was in too much difficulty to compete in an arms race. He thought that if he could first cure the stagflation that afflicted the US economy, he could force the Soviets to the negotiating table by going through the motion of launching an arms race. “Star wars” was mainly hype. (Whether or nor the Soviets believed the arms race threat, the American leftwing clearly did and has never got over it.)

Reagan had no intention of dominating the Soviet Union or collapsing it. Unlike Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama, he was not controlled by neoconservatives. Reagan fired and prosecuted the neoconservatives in his administration when they operated behind his back and broke the law. The Soviet Union did not collapse because of Reagan’s determination to end the Cold War. The Soviet collapse was the work of hardline communists, who believed that Gorbachev was loosening the Communist Party’s hold so quickly that Gorbachev was a threat to the existence of the Soviet Union and placed him under house arrest. It was the hardline communist coup against Gorbachev that led to the rise of Yeltsin. No one expected the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The US military/security complex did not want Reagan to end the Cold War, as the Cold War was the foundation of profit and power for the complex. The CIA told Reagan that if he renewed the arms race, the Soviets would win, because the Soviets controlled investment and could allocate a larger share of the economy to the military than Reagan could. Reagan did not believe the CIA’s claim that the Soviet Union could prevail in an arms race. He formed a secret committee and gave the committee the power to investigate the CIA’s claim that the US would lose an arms race with the Soviet Union. The committee concluded that the CIA was protecting its prerogatives. I know this because I was a member of the committee.

Secretary of State John Kerry rebuked Israel for its settlement policy and warned in unusually harsh terms that a two-state solution was in serious jeopardy as the Obama administration raced to preserve its approach to the Middle East weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes power. Mr. Kerry’s speech on Wednesday—in which he defended a U.S. decision to allow a United Nations resolution condemning Israel’s settlements—was seen by Israeli leaders as a parting shot from an unfriendly American administration in its final weeks. But the address appeared equally intended as a message to the incoming Trump team.

Mr. Kerry spelled out principles that have long been largely consistent in American policy—the goal of Israel existing alongside a separate Palestinian state, the notion that the settlements are an impediment to peace, and the idea that Jerusalem should be the capital of both an Israeli and a Palestinian state. Mr. Trump has suggested he would consider breaking with those principles. “President Obama and I know that the incoming administration has signaled that they may take a different path,” Mr. Kerry said at the State Department. “But we cannot in good conscience do nothing, and say nothing, when we see the hope of peace slipping away.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has ruled in favor of a conservative group’s lawsuit against the State Department over whether or not enough was done to try to restore Clinton’s missing emails, opening a potential further probe into Clinton’s emails by the Trump administration. Back in January, a District Court judge ruled that the lawsuit brought by the conservative group Judicial Watch, against the State Department, had no validity because it had there had been a “sustained effort” to recover the emails. In the new ruling, however, Judge Stephen Williams wrote that this wasn’t enough.

“The Department has not explained why shaking the tree harder – e.g., by following the statutory mandate to seek action by the Attorney General – might not bear more still,” wrote Williams. He added: “Absent a showing that the requested enforcement action could not shake loose a few more emails, the case is not moot.” Williams also said that it’s “abundantly clear that, in terms of assuring government recovery of emails” the conservative group that brought the lawsuit hasn’t “been given everything [they] asked for.” Additionally, because former State Secretary Clinton used her Blackberry email account during the first few weeks of her term, the judge felt that efforts to restore just the messages from Clinton’s private email server weren’t sufficient either.

“Because the complaints sought recovery of emails from all of the former Secretary’s accounts, the FBI’s recovery of a server that hosted only one account does not moot the suits,” he wrote. Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton issued a statement after the ruling, claiming “The courts seem to be fed up with the Obama administration’s refusal to enforce the rule of law on the Clinton emails.” Fitton added, “This ruling means that the Trump Justice Department will have to decide if it wants to finally enforce the rule of law and try to retrieve all the emails Clinton and her aides unlawfully took with them when they left the State Department,” he added.

House flipping, a potent symbol of the real-estate market’s excess in the run-up to the financial crisis, is once again becoming hot, fueled by a combination of skyrocketing home prices, venture-backed startups and Wall Street cash. After nearly being felled by real-estate forays almost a decade ago, a number of banks are now arranging financing vehicles for house flippers, who aim to make a profit by buying and selling homes in a matter of months. The sector is small—participants say roughly several hundred million dollars in financing deals have been made in recent months—but is expected to keep growing. In recent months, big banks, including Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have started extending credit lines to companies that specialize in lending to home flippers.

[..] Over the past year, 37-year-old David Franco has collected profits of more than $200,000 on houses that he has quickly refurbished and resold, turning a hobby into an unexpectedly lucrative business. “There’s plenty of money to be made,” says Mr. Franco, who lives just outside of Los Angeles. House-flipping television shows and training “schools” for new investors are proliferating. One “super-intense, hardcore” house-flipping boot camp in Bourne, Mass., promised to teach students about real-estate investing in three days to make “REALLY MASSIVE PROFITS,” according to marketing literature. The increasing amount of speculative housing in recent months is “concerning,” ATTOM noted in a recent report. “We’re starting to see home flipping hit some milestones not seen since prior to the financial crisis.”

ATTOM said profit margins are getting squeezed in some markets. While house flippers typically aim to purchase a house at a 30% discount to the market, in some areas they’re buying homes at a 15% or 10% discount, said Senior Vice President Daren Blomquist. The research firm noted that the number of smaller, inexperienced house flippers entering the market is a sign of rising speculation. George Geronsin, 36, a Southern California real-estate agent and house-flipper who has been in the business since 2008, said he recently sold the majority of the homes he was working on and is sitting on cash “until the next big correction” in the housing market. “Anybody and everybody is getting into the business of house-flipping—that’s when you know it’s the end of the rope,” said Mr. Geronsin.

Last year, China’s leaders were touting plans for deleveraging and supply-side reform. This year, they’re touting yet more plans for deleveraging and supply-side reform. In between, total outstanding credit rose from 246% of gross domestic product to about 265%… Although reining in credit is essential for addressing many of China’s economic problems, the government is still targeting 6.5% growth next year, much of which will be reliant on yet more debt. So pay less attention to the talk and more to the data – specifically, metrics such as credit growth and real-estate prices.

Follow the Fed.China remains tied to the U.S. economy, whether it wants to be or not. Unfortunately, not everything that’s good for the U.S. is good for China. With the U.S. labor market tightening, and President-elect Donald Trump promising a $1 trillion economic stimulus, it is all but certain that the Federal Reserve will continue raising interest rates in 2017. That could have some positive effects for China’s real economy, but it will also put pressure on the People’s Bank of China to raise its own interest rates or risk breaking the soft peg of the yuan to the U.S. dollar. Higher rates, in turn, would raise borrowing costs for heavily indebted Chinese companies, many of which could end up in bankruptcy. How fast the U.S. economy grows, and how many times the Fed raises rates, could have as much impact on China’s economy as anything next year.

The cure can be worse than the disease. Rising asset prices in China have helped prop up everything from coal and steel firms to consumer sentiment. But with potential bubbles popping up everywhere, the government seems to be laying the groundwork for reform. That could mean raising interest rates, applying new restrictions on trading or tightening other regulations. Remember that such measures, however necessary, carry risks of their own. For example, given that China has some of the world’s most expensive housing relative to income, and extremely low turnover, withdrawing credit could result in a real-estate price shock. That might cause indebted developers to fail, or lead to much stronger government action to prevent a hard landing. As regulators try to rein in other asset prices, watch for similar turmoil in bonds and the yuan.

Expect the unexpected. China has long been plagued by poor-quality data, with even senior leadership expressing frustration at getting inaccurate information from the provinces. Unreliable data makes it nearly impossible to properly assess risk, which raises the probability of some type of internal shock. It could come from the nearly $4 trillion market in murky wealth-management products. It could come from social instability tied to hidden unemployment. It could come from something totally unexpected: With the bond market in turmoil, liquidity concerns mounting and defaults rising, there are many ways in which a panic could materialize.

He is known in China as the “godfather of real estate,” helping lay the groundwork for private homeownership in China, a move that enriched millions and laid the foundations for a vibrant and thriving Chinese middle class. Now, Meng Xiaosu wants a lot of Chinese — the older ones, specifically — to cash out. Older people need to mortgage their homes to address China’s looming demographic bust, Mr. Meng argues. Because of China’s now-defunct one-child policy and other social trends, the country has a rapidly graying population that someday soon may become too expensive for the Chinese government to support. Mr. Meng’s proposed solution is to bring reverse mortgages to China. Called a house-for-pension plan in China, a reverse mortgage allows homeowners to tap the equity in their homes by taking out loans against it.

His argument faces deep business and cultural opposition – mortgaging homes is a tough sell in a country where parents traditionally passed them on to their children – and only a few dozen people in all the country have signed up so far. But he argues that China may have little choice. “China’s elderly do not have much money,” said Mr. Meng, who drew much of his inspiration about the Chinese property market from a stint studying in America, “but they have valuable homes.” China is increasingly pondering tough questions as it looks to a graying future. Right now, China’s 215 million elderly people account for 15% of the total population. By 2050, that number is expected to rise to 350 million – nearly one-quarter of the population.

That has China scrambling to find a more sustainable pension system for its people. In the 1990s, the government dismantled the cradle-to-grave welfare system and borrowed money from younger workers to pay older ones. The country’s pension fund will be $116 trillion in the red by 2050, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a top government think tank. Enter Mr. Meng.

China has cut oil product export quotas to the nation’s four oil majors by 40% in the first round of licences for 2017, according to two sources who have seen the documents, even as traders expect allowances for overseas sales to meet or exceed this year’s record levels. The notice did not include quotas for independent refiners, known as “teapots”, in line with a report by Reuters earlier this month that the government has ditched the small refiners from its export program. In a notice dated Dec. 23, the Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs said the four state majors will be allowed to sell 12.4 million tonnes of gasoline, gasoil and jet fuel abroad next year.

That’s down from 20.54 million tonnes in the same round this year. Still, the cut is likely to bring little relief to the stubbornly saturated Asian oil market as China’s majors did not use up the huge quotas issued at the start of last year, and have simply applied for more realistic quotas this year, traders said. “The shrinking quota doesn’t reflect shrinking demand from overseas. Instead, it reflects a shift in company exporting strategy,” said a China-based trader who declined to be named, adding that companies were better matching exports to quotas. “We expect the total quota for 2017 to be on par or a bit higher than 2016,” the trader added. China issued allowances for a record 46.08 million tonnes of oil products in 2016, up 80% from 2015. In the first 11 months of the year, it exported 43 million tonnes of oil products – including products other than gasoline, gasoil and jet fuel – up 35% on a year earlier.

China’s balancing act isn’t getting any easier. Policy makers are grappling with how to attack excessive borrowing and rein in soaring property prices while maintaining rapid growth. They’re also battling yuan depreciation and capital outflow pressures as U.S. interest rates rise, while on the horizon looms the risk of confrontation with America’s President-elect Donald Trump on trade and Taiwan. It’s a high-wire act with the potential to produce shocks, like the one erupting in the bond market as tighter liquidity threatens financing for small companies. President Xi Jinping told top officials he’s open to growth below the 6.5% target to 2020 if it carries too much risk, a person familiar with the situation said last week. Leaders have pledged to reduce hazards for 2017.

While forecasters have been raising growth estimates for next year and don’t expect major turbulence, the following are among areas they flag as having the potential to trigger a plunge in growth or systemic risk in the financial system: Outflows will exceed $200 billion in the fourth quarter and rise further in the first quarter, said Pauline Loong, managing director at research firm Asia-Analytica in Hong Kong. Capital is leaving for more fundamental reasons than rising U.S. rates and a stronger dollar, she said. Drivers include rising expectations of yuan weakness, fears of an abrupt policy U-turn trapping funds in the country, and a lack of profitable investment opportunities at home amid rising costs and slowing growth.

“The real nightmare for Beijing – and for markets – is a vicious cycle of capital outflows triggering bigger devaluations of the yuan that in turn drive bigger and faster outflows,” Loong said. “We expect capital outflows to increase in the coming months as Chinese money seeks to maximize exit quotas in case of more stringent restrictions later on.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s goal of overhauling the U.S. tax code in 2017 will depend partly on the work of an obscure congressional committee tasked with estimating how much future economic growth will result from tax cuts. Known as the Joint Committee on Taxation, or JCT, the nonpartisan panel assigns “dynamic scores” to major tax bills in Congress, based on economic models, to forecast a bill’s ultimate impact on the federal budget. The higher a tax bill’s dynamic score, the more likely it is seen as spurring growth, raising tax revenues and keeping the federal deficit in check. As Trump and Republicans in Congress plan the biggest tax reform package in a generation, the JCT has come under pressure from corporate lobbyists and other tax cut advocates who worry that too low a dynamic score could show the legislation to add billions, if not trillions of dollars to the federal deficit.

“The problem is that the Joint Committee staff has adopted a whole series of assumptions that truly minimize the effects and underestimate the impact that a properly done tax reform could have,” said David Burton at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. A low dynamic score could force Republicans to scale back tax cuts or make the reforms temporary, severely limiting the scope of what was one of Trump’s top campaign pledges. Other analysts warn that pressure for a robust dynamic score raises the danger of a politically expedient number that could help reform pass Congress but lead to higher deficits down the road. Until last year, JCT used a variety of economic models in its arcane calculations, reflecting the uncertainties in such work. But House of Representatives Republicans changed the rules in 2015 to require that a bill’s score reflect only a single estimate of the estimated impact on the wider economy and resulting impact on tax revenues.

Next year’s anticipated tax reform package would be the biggest piece of legislation that JCT has scored using this new, narrower approach, presenting the committee with a daunting challenge. JCT Chief of Staff Thomas Barthold acknowledged the challenge of dynamic scoring in an interview with Reuters. “The U.S. economy is so darn complex, you really can’t have one model that picks up all of the complexity and nuance. So the essence of modeling is to try to slim things down, try to emphasize certain points,” he said. Tax reform is still months away. But the initial legislation expected in 2017 is likely to fall somewhere between two similar but separate plans, one backed by Trump and the other by House Republicans including Speaker Paul Ryan.

[..]The Tax Foundation estimates that the House Republican tax plan would lead to a 9.1% higher GDP over the long term, 7.7% higher wages and 1.7 million new full-time-equivalent jobs. It predicts the plan would reduce government revenue by $2.4 trillion over a decade, not counting macroeconomic effects, but by only $191 billion once economic growth is taken into account. By contrast, the centrist Tax Policy Center estimates the House plan would add 1% to GDP over 10 years and erase $2.5 trillion of revenue, even with positive macroeconomic feedback, due to higher federal debt interest.

Migration Policy Minister Yiannis Mouzalas vowed on Wednesday to improve living conditions for migrants stranded on the islands, boost policing and create detention centers. “We are planning to have new, small venues on the islands, either by setting up small, two-story houses, in order to empty the tents, or by finding other places… to improve conditions,” he said, adding that it will take time but “we will do it.” Overcrowded conditions, coupled with the slow processing of asylum requests, have fueled tensions, while outbreaks of violence are not uncommon – especially on the islands, where some 15,000 migrants are crammed into ill-equipped camps. Mouzalas, however, insisted that the situation is better on the mainland and all refugees in the 36 camps there are staying in sheltered, heated areas.

The exception, he said, is the camp at Elliniko, southern Athens, where some migrants are still living outdoors in 70 tents. He also announced that by March, soup kitchens at camps around the country will be abolished. Instead, he said, migrants will be given money – no more than the minimum wage of €400. Mouzalas said Greece will hire more staff to deal with the slow pace of processing asylum requests, which he called an Achilles’ heel. Moreover, he said that migrants living legally in Greece will receive an electronic card that will replace their residence permits. The card, he said, will contain biometric data and other information, and will be given to migrants who want to renew their residence permits or to new arrivals.

The cards will be ready by April, he said, adding that they are part of the effort to modernize the system that processes residence permits, and to help fight forgeries. Roughly 60,000 migrants – mostly Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans fleeing war and poverty – are scattered throughout the country, many living in overcrowded and poor living conditions.